As always, if you have questions or concerns, contact your program director. We’re also interested in hearing how your lab validates key biological and chemical reagents, so tell us about your procedures!

2 comments on “Reproducibility Update: New Resources and Expected Changes to the SF424 Application Guide”

As we are well aware, there are many aspects to the issue of “reproducibility”. We have just published a seminal paper in PLoS ONE that addresses an important aspect of this matter. The paper addresses the topic of specifying dose in cell culture experiments. We propose that specifying dose as moles per cell along with traditional approaches provides much more information, leads to greater efficiency, and will greatly improve reproducibility in cell culture experiments. In the long term we think this will lead to better translation of preclinical findings to improve healthcare.

We think this approach will result in the savings of millions of dollars each year by the NIH and its grantees because of more successful experimental design, increased information content in the data, leading to enhanced data interpretation. The additional cost and time required in the lab is minimal.

We hope this work will change how cell culture studies are designed, executed, interpreted, and reported all across the scientific community.